Influence
The Long Christmas Dinner inspired a famous scene in Orson Welles's 1941 film Citizen Kane — the breakfast-table montage in which the nine-year deterioration of Kane's marriage is told through a conversation seen in five vignettes. Several breakfast scenes were to be filmed, but during shooting Welles had the idea of simply photographing it as a continuous scene without dissolves, with the camera whipping back and forth.
" was stolen from The Long Christmas Dinner of Thornton Wilder!" Welles told filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich. "I did the breakfast scene thinking I'd invented it. It wasn't in the script originally. And when I was almost finished with it, I suddenly realized that I'd unconsciously stolen it from Thornton and I called him up and admitted to it." When Bogdanovich asked how Wilder reacted, Welles replied, "He was pleased." Welles and Wilder were good friends.
Read more about this topic: The Long Christmas Dinner
Famous quotes containing the word influence:
“You can never really live anyone else’s life, not even your child’s. The influence you exert is through your own life, and what you’ve become yourself.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)
“The purifying, healing influence of literature, the dissipating of passions by knowledge and the written word, literature as the path to understanding, forgiveness and love, the redeeming might of the word, the literary spirit as the noblest manifestation of the spirit of man, the writer as perfected type, as saint.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it, will have its influence and its place, just as our body will pass into the composition of grass, of sheep, of cutlets, and of men. We do not like that kind of immortality, but what is to be done about it?”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)